[Mr. Selvetarm]

I've run out of room on my windows partition. I have no external drives that offer the performance I need, and buying a new HDD for my MBP is out of the question. (At least until my warranty is up) So, I've got my 80gb Ipod Classic, with about 60gbs of free space and was like well why can't I use this? Anyway is this possible? Especially with the performance of the games to be stored on it, will it even be viable? Thanks in advance.

[teflon]

well, its a 1.8" drive which wont be anywhere near fast enough to give you even a semblance of speedy loading. Im not even sure if they can properly saturate the USB2 interface, though they probably can, seeing as its not difficult. But in reality, the drive will be slower than almost any 2.5" or 3.5" HDD you can find, so anything youve already got will definitely be plenty fast. I myself use an external 2.5" drive for most of my games, keeping the most played on my internal partition.

I believe that this is possible though, if tricky. head into iTunes and in the iPod's options somewhere you can turn "Enable Disk Use" on. But seeing as youre using it on your mac, chances are that its configured to be HFS+. So youll need to get iTunes on that windows partition and put it into FAT32 unsing iTunes. put a song or two on there, enable disk use and hop back over to OS X. Now go into itunes, and try to add a song or two (dont forget to set it to manual song management), if it sticks then youre in luck and you can just use the iPod right there and then as its FAT32, if not then youll have to try going into disk utility, creating a new set of partitions.

But seriously, just get a decent external HDD or think about how you can repurpose what you already have, they will definitely be faster than your iPod.

[Mr. Selvetarm]

I have an old 40gb HDD lying around along with an External enclosure, its loud as hell though. It seriously starts screaming when its starts going. I'll try it tonight.

[AussieMacGamer]

Just buy an external Hard Drive. Theyre very cheap these days for lots of space.

[teflon]

yeah, grab a new drive for that enclosure and chuck the 40Gb, its not worth it any more.
Are we talking 2.5" or 3.5"? either way you can get 250Gb or 500Gb respectively for around $75 I think.

[Mr. Selvetarm]

I guess its going on my Christmas list.

[Mr. Selvetarm]

Yep, I guess it was on my Christmas list. Blew $100 today on a 640 gb WD My Book. It's currently being used by Time Machine but it seems fine so far.

[teflon]

thats quite a good price, if I remember correctly.

Did you partition it at all? cos you shoulda done that before starting down the Time Machine route, seeing as its more hassle to partition after the fact than before.

[Mr. Selvetarm]

Wow, I wish I had rechecked IMG before I did anything. SO I have my 90gb little time machine backup on there now. After that finished I popped on over to Windows and lo and behold it knew there was a HDD attached but it didn't show up at all under My Computer. So I rebooted in Leopard, immediately went into Disk Utillity and made two partitions, one a 150gb HFS+ partion for the present and future Time Machine stuff, and second a 446gb free space partition. I chose free space because at the time, I didn't realize that in Macworld MS-DOS(FAT) means FAT32 and not what it says it means.


So for anyone that knows, a quick question. Does MS-DOS(FAT) really mean FAT32 or do I have to use partition magic in my Windows side.

[teflon]

yeah windows cant read HFS+ without a 3rd party driver, which costs money...

FAT means FAT32 (but without the 32Gb size limit that this implies). Windows will be able to read and write to it just fine.
But I wouldnt really recommend having FAT32 as the primary 'free space' format. The main reason behind this being that it cant handle files over the size of 4GB, which are fairly common, depending on how you use your computer.

Also, for the Time Machine section, you should have a think about what files are getting updated. For example, you might not want to have the System folder copied, which is a good 5Gb of space which gradually changes. Equally, if theres another folder whose contents change on a regular basis, (desktop, movies, iTunes music) you might want to exclude those and back that part up manually.
Youd be surprised how quickly that 90Gb of space gets bigger (think maybe 2 months to fill up the rest of that space), and excluding the iTunes and putting that on the other partition would save, say, 25Gb of that.

of course, you can just backup everything, but given Time Machine's grounding as a versioning backup system, you might as well exclude a lot of the stuff which will either change very very often, and so take up a lot of space, or barely changes at all, and so takes up a lot of redundant space. (should you decide to do this, dont forget to head into TM and delete the backups of the folders you now exclude)

[Eric5h5]

teflon, on December 27th 2008, 07:49 AM, said:

FAT means FAT32 (but without the 32Gb size limit that this implies).

It implies 32 bit, actually, hence the 4GB file size limit.

--Eric

[teflon]

oh yeah... how silly of me
my bad.

[the Battle Cat]

teflon, on December 27th 2008, 09:29 AM, said:

oh yeah... how silly of me
my bad.

At least you can take solace in how freakin' awesome your Popeye Analogy was.